Professor Isaac Antonowski is a sixty-five-year-old Comparative Literature professor from Berlin teaching at an Indiana University in the 1950s. He has been in the United States for fifteen years since the death of his wife Tanya. He and Tanya had moved throughout Europe to escape the terrors of the 1940s, and after their daughter Katrinka's move to Israel (which the professor refers to as Palestine), the loneliness of exile was too much for Tanya to endure. Isaac, separated from family, has not seen his daughter since her move. She became a "fighting Jew" after the terror of the Nazis and changed her name to Keturah. She sends letters twice a year at Passover and Rosh Hashanah. Isaac receives a letter and knows it is not from Katrinka. Earlier that morning, after having received the letter, he said hello to fellow professor Karl Thomas. Karl calls Isaac "Ike" and tells him he wants to get Isaac's reaction to something. He invites Isaac to talk in his office later that night about a letter. The entire leaves a sour taste in Isaac's mouth, and he suspects that Karl wrote the hateful letter. Isaac decides he will not visit Karl's office that night. Despite his intentions to not meet Karl, Isaac ends up doing so anyway after finding himself walking back to campus that night. Karl offers to take Isaac's coat and tells him he is glad Isaac came. He tells Isaac that he has been troubled ever since their talk that morning, until he realized that Isaac, too, must have received a letter. The idea that Karl also received a hateful letter leaves Isaac in surprise. When Isaac asks who would send such a thing, Karl responds, "Reginald Pomfret Skeleton," the same person who wrote on the walls of bathrooms back at Karl's high school in Kansas. He was the one who wrote everything everywhere on walls and billboards across the nation. The two men revel in the private joke.